The Oracle, page 27
Karl asks him, “What else did you see?”
“I—I saw the end of the war. Newspapers declaring victory. People celebrating in the streets, cheering and waving flags. Ah, Churchill gave a rousing speech about the future. King George VI stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with his family as fighter planes roared overhead.”
“Be careful,” Karl says. “These visions are powerful—intoxicating. They’re like a drug.”
“What? No. This… It’s wonderful.”
“It’s deceptive,” Karl says. “Bewitching.”
That the lieutenant is not even curious about what the Omphalos is, or how it works, or where it really came from, is alarming to Karl.
He watches the lieutenant’s hands as they cup the Omphalos, hovering near its golden surface without touching it, examining it as though it were a crystal ball revealing the future. The greed Karl felt when he first held the Omphalos is visible in the lieutenant’s eyes. Delight rules his mind. He’s a principled man, but the power of the Oracle is corrupting. Karl can see it all so clearly now, something he couldn’t see when he held the Omphalos himself.
“Think of all the good we could do with this.”
“The good?” Karl asks, leaning closer, wanting some clarification.
“With this, we could win the war. We could win every war.”
Karl smiles, but not out of joy. The smile on his face is one of realization.
What’s good is relative. What appears good to the lieutenant is bad for Karl and his people. Germany is going to lose the war anyway, with or without the Oracle. Karl’s already seen that in a vision, and so too has the lieutenant. For the British officer, though, it’s a question of what more can be gained, but life is about tradeoffs. A cheetah feeds its cubs while the herd mourns its loss. London will be rebuilt, as will Paris and Berlin, but not until war has exacted its toll. And the future? Who will claim the unknown? Should anyone hold an advantage over days still to come? Is not the future there for everyone to explore together?
When Karl thinks of Adolf Hitler and the German conquest of Europe, he sees naive optimism and misplaced trust leading to an abuse of power. The problem isn’t that Hitler lied to the German people but that the German people believed his lies. And that belief led them into a war that has killed tens of millions of people.
The lieutenant says, “Think of the—”
“No,” Karl snaps, cutting him off.
Karl does the only thing he can. He grabs the Omphalos, snatching the golden orb from in front of the lieutenant. The officer’s eyes go wide. Anger rises on his face, but Karl knows what must be done. He is going to betray Sophia. As much as that realization hurts, he knows he must act now, as he’ll never have this opportunity again. In that fraction of a second, Karl wonders if the Oracle has predicted its own future, if it knows what is about to happen, if it has always known this day would come, if it knew from back when he first touched the Omphalos in that damp, dark cave?
Karl clutches the Omphalos to his chest. He turns and runs toward the stern of the warship. His boots pound on the metal deck.
“Noooo,” the lieutenant yells.
“Halt,” one of the sailors cries.
“Stop, or I’ll shoot,” the other yells, swinging his rifle down from his shoulder. The steel bolt is cycled. A round is loaded.
Karl sprints between wooden crates stacked on the deck.
His feet cannot carry him fast enough. His boots are heavy, weighing him down. His overalls are loose. The upper half is unbuttoned. The collar catches the wind, flapping around as he runs.
The stern narrows. Ropes have been coiled on the deck. A flag flutters at the rear of the warship. Stanchions hold wires in place, forming the railing along the back of the vessel.
The Oracle seizes hold of Karl’s mind, but he refuses to surrender. He fights the menace invading his thinking. The Omphalos extracts the details of the past few days from his memories, causing his sight to blur.
Sailors run in from all sides, reaching for him, trying to cut him off.
A shot is fired.
The crack of gunfire explodes around Karl. It’s incongruous with reality—thunder breaking in the brilliance of a clear blue day. If the bullet hits him, he doesn’t feel it. The adrenaline surging through his body carries him on, but suddenly Karl feels as though he’s wading through molasses. He can’t move his legs fast enough. Some invisible force is holding him back, pulling him to a halt. And it’s then he realizes he’s been hit.
Blood squirts from the side of his chest, bursting across the deck, leaving bright red streaks on the metal surface. His feet falter, but he cannot stop.
Another shot rings out.
Karl raises his arms, holding the Omphalos high. Strength drains from his muscles like the blood running from the gaping wound in his chest. Pain shocks his mind. It is as though he’s been stabbed by a red-hot iron taken from a fire.
In those final few seconds, Karl realizes the Oracle has preyed on humanity, drawing out information with the allure of the future. Those who sought the wisdom of the Oracle never knew it was using them, toying with them, playing them. Humans are blinded by greed. They couldn’t see that the Oracle is a probe sent not to help them but to exploit them, to learn from them and analyze their behavior. The Oracle serves another master. And that makes it dangerous. It’s not that it would harm anyone, but that it cannot be tamed.
As his boots scuff the deck of the warship, Karl mumbles, “No one can have this…” A third shot rings out as he adds, “Power.”
Karl staggers, reaching the rear of the warship. With his hands held high, he hurls the Omphalos into the sea, watching as the golden orb sails out over the sea. The alien artifact splashes into the water, disappearing into the depths. Within seconds, the white foam is gone. The ripples fade. It’s over.
Karl feels he’s done what someone should have done thousands of years ago. He’s removed the Oracle’s hold over humanity. To his mind, it’s not that the Oracle is evil or even that humanity isn’t ready for such power, but rather that the future always lies ahead, never behind.
To know the future is the desire of fools. For Karl, it’s folly. Rather than wanting to change the future, twisting and turning it to one’s advantage, he realizes that people ought to seize the moment now. Ultimately, now is what determines the future. There is no fate, Karl decides. The future is a dream—an illusion. Now is all that ever exists. The past is gone. The future is merely a string of possibilities waiting to unfold. And Karl is determined to spare others from the temptation of dreaming instead of having the courage to act.
“Nooo,” the lieutenant says, running up beside him and grabbing the wire fence wrapping around the stern. He looks for any sign of the strange alien device, but it’s gone.
“Yes,” Karl says, sinking to his knees, feeling his life drain from his body. He slumps against a crate on the rear of the warship. Blood soaks the deck around him. The barrels of rifles point at him, but all he can see is the smooth expanse of the Mediterranean stretching out behind the ship. The day is too beautiful to be marred by war.
Karl has no regrets.
If Sophia were here, she’d understand, of that, he’s sure.
As his life ebbs away, Karl realizes that, if he dies on the deck of this British warship, no one will ever know what happened at Dephi over these last few days. They’ll commit his body to the deep, where it will rest with that strange golden orb known as the Omphalos. The Oracle will be but a legend, a myth uttered only in astonishment at the gullibility of generations past. The world will cycle on. Empires will rise and fall. Humanity will wax and wane like the phases of the moon, advancing in some areas, regressing in others.
Like so many who have died on the battlefields of history, no one will ever know what Karl sacrificed. And what about the alien species that created the Oracle? What will come of the disturbing intelligence behind that prophetic machine? What intentions do they have for the natives of the third planet orbiting around this particular star? What machinations drive them on as they explore the galaxy? Or have they already gone extinct, vanishing from sight like the Greek civilization or the Roman Empire? If there is anyone out there among the stars capturing the interactions of the Oracle, what will they make of his life or Sophia’s? What will they make of the grand war between the Axis Powers and the Allied Forces? Will they ever again set foot on the rugged slopes of Mt. Parnassus as they did in the days of Apollo? Will they understand what Karl did and why? Will they agree with the decision he and Sophie reached to free humanity from the temptation to meddle with its own future?
Sitting there with bullet holes in his chest, barely able to breathe, Karl rallies hope. He’s convinced. He’s not going to die. He’s seen the future. Berlin will burn.
The Oracle wouldn’t lie to him, would it?
The Oracle can’t lie, can it?
Darkness washes over him like a storm rolling in from the ocean.
The End
Epilogue
Being close to the galactic bulge, the dark skies of Pythia are radiant with pinpricks of light. Actual daylight won’t become apparent until the planet passes closer to its host star, sailing inside what would be the orbital distance of the spectacular ringed planet in Earth’s solar system. Until then, the night is eternal. The stars, though, are magnificent.
As the planet rotates, the galactic bulge comes into view. Less than one percent of the stars within the bulge are visible to the naked Pythian eye, but as the bulge contains billions of stars, it means millions of them are packed into an area that spans the width of a human hand held at arm’s length. It is as though a can of paint has been splashed on the sky. From there, the stars spread out in a trail stretching either side of the bulge, forming the arms of the spiral galaxy. Off to one side, a nebula is visible. Wispy blue-green clouds billow around lumpy dust clouds in a stellar nursery. Newborn stars radiate with energy, pushing back the edges of the clouds as they wander away from their celestial womb. With such sights, it is no wonder the Pythians took to the skies to explore outer space.
Tor Mah sits with Shak Mon within the Institute for First Contact, reviewing the latest data from Earth. Although the humans they’re hearing about are long dead, having lived and died hundreds of orbits ago, the lag due to the speed of light means the records the two of them are watching feel as though they’re set in the present.
“Is this what you want?” Private Karl Meier yells over the wind and the waves and the clash of thunder within the pouring rain.
Without direct contact, the Omphalos is blind, only able to detect basic environmental information, but it seems as though the German Private is offering it up as a sacrifice to appease an angry god in the midst of a storm.
“Is this what you’re after?”
“He knows about us,” Tor Mah says.
“Are you sure?” Shak Mon asks. “I mean, this sounds like an offering to a deity.”
“No. He feels it,” Tor Mah says, looking at the associated data in the stream that reveals Karl’s madly beating heart and the pitching of the boat within the storm.
Although Tor’s primary data source is sensor information picked up by the Omphalos, they’ve also got distinct memories of the event to compare. The problem is that those memories were retrieved much later, when the German was shot by a British sailor, and the physiological shock caused them to fragment.
“You can’t show this to the council. They’ll think he’s primitive. Superstitious.”
“Or frustrated. Hurt…”
“I know you want to find something in the logs,” Shak Mon says. “Something positive, some way of redeeming this mission. I understand your desire, but we have to accept reality. They’re barbaric.”
Tor Mah ignores her, saying, “Listen to what he’s saying… He’s speaking to us.”
“Us?”
“To you and me.”
“What? No. He’s calling out to the storm.”
“In that moment, yes, but he knew that one day, we would hear this. He knew he could speak to us across the vast void of space and time. Listen carefully to his words.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Karl yells as waves crash on the deck of his wooden fishing boat. Spray lashes his face. “You’ve seen me. You’ve seen my life, but you forget. I’ve seen you. I know what you are!”
Tor Mah lets out a single laugh, speaking as though the German can hear him. “Yes, you do, Private Soldat Karl Meier. You never left your planet. You never had the opportunity to soar between the stars, but you saw us. You saw beyond the Omphalos, beyond even the Oracle itself. You saw the Pythia.”
“But they’re animals,” Shak Mon says. “At best, they’re peasants. Even with all they have accomplished, they’re still in their infancy.”
“Do not mistake technological progress for intelligence, my friend. Even on their world, some of the most intelligent among them lived thousands of years before they achieved the mastery of flight or the ability to harness electricity.
“Socrates, Aristotle and Plato would never live to see their ideas realized, but that didn’t make their ideas any less real. And the same is true here on Pythia… This Karl. This Karl Meier. This lowly private in the German Army. He knew who we were. He didn’t need a telescope to see us. He understood what we were doing with the Oracle on his world.”
“You admire him.”
“I do,” Tor Mah says. “And I mourn him.”
The anaconda-like creature with a seemingly mythical hydra head containing dozens of snake-like tentacles protruding from its mouth manipulates a holographic image with surprising dexterity. Its dual eyes bob on stalks reaching up from its head, seeing over its tentacles. Rather than looking at screens of data, there are transparent, cylindrical columns that can be unrolled with a flick of the tongue. He scrolls through images and brings up the conversation on the warship.
Already, the analysis engine within the Institute of First Contact has provided a detailed categorization of human technology based on the design of the HMS Tuscan. The lieutenant’s memories allowed it to map not only the interior of the ship but also the various roles of sailors onboard. Simply being on the deck of the warship allowed the Omphalos to correlate this with its own detection of electrical impulses from the engines. The alien probe saw electricity flowing through cables hidden beneath the deck. It listened to both sonar and radar, along with various radio broadcasts. The HMS Tuscan’s mass, length, displacement, engine rumble, guns, smoke stack and hull thickness all helped to build the Pythian understanding of human technological progress, but Tor Mah ignores all that. He’s interested in the conversation between Private Karl Meier and the British officer. Tor Mah is looking for something other than scientific ingenuity; he’s searching for signs of moral civilization.
“Listen to the lieutenant. Listen to what he says after interacting with the Oracle.”
“With this, we could win the war. We could win every war.”
“And they could,” Shak Mon says.
“But Karl didn’t think that way,” Tor Mah says. “He wasn’t tempted. He could have been, but he wasn’t. Mark his response.”
“These visions are powerful—intoxicating. They’re like a drug.”
“I don’t get it,” Shak Mon says.
Tor Mah replies, “Don’t you see? He’s not fooled by us. He should have been, but he’s not. For the people of his world, the Oracle is magic, but he’s not seduced.”
“Seduced? By us?”
“There’s nuance in what he’s saying.”
“It’s deceptive,” the ghost of Private Karl Meier says. “Bewitching.”
Tor Mah says, “Think about it. Our First Contact probes. We thought of them as non-invasive and passive, but the Oracle has influenced their world. They worship it like a god.”
“But not Private Karl Meier,” Shak Mon says as the realization hits.
With a flick of a few of his mouth tentacles, Tor Mah brings up Karl, lamenting the death of Sophia as he sails out of the Gulf of Corinth.
“We get distracted by the spectacle… The Oracle shows us the future. And we are in awe.”
Tor Mah says, “Karl sees the Oracle for what it is, and he’s not swayed. He didn’t want the Omphalos for himself. He’s not blinded by what he could gain from the Oracle.”
“He has emergent intelligence.”
“Exactly,” Tor Mah says. “Animals are selfish. Animals are driven by instinct and impulse. Animals are blind to their impact on others.”
“But Private Karl Meier,” Shak Mon says. “He threw away the Omphalos.”
“Yes, he did. He understood the frailty of his own species—but not just him. They all did. Every high priestess of Pythia. Across thousands of years. Don’t you see? The council is wrong. Humans are not barbaric. They were, but they’re in the process of maturing. Like a child, they’re growing up, but no one becomes an adult on a single day. There is no one moment where everything before is childhood and all that follows is adulthood. No, like the dawn of day, darkness slowly fades as the light rises over the ocean.”
Shak Mon says, “And you think this is proof that light is rising on Earth?”
“That is my contention,” Tor Mah says. “That is what I seek to demonstrate before the council.”
“I’m not sure they’ll believe you,” Shak Mon replies. “I mean, why would they believe in humanity when there are the likes of Adolf Hitler? When one man can sway tens of millions of others into waging a war that spans the entire world, why would anyone believe humans are capable of change?”
“Because he changed,” Tor Mah says. “Once, Karl Meier loved the Führer, and then he didn’t. He loved Germany, and then he learned what that meant and how it was being used to justify hatred.”
“But he’s just one man.”
“They’re all just one man, one woman, one child. They may act collectively, but humans decide individually.”
